The Plains is a particularly good natural laboratory for the study of aging because intergenerational relations in these societies were organized in two basically different ways. Among Plains groups with age-graded social structures elders were dominant in religious and political and often economic spheres of life. Among other groups, kinship or individual inclination, rather than age, influenced the character of relationships between generations and the role of elders. The proposed research focuses on the Southern Arapahos (with a theocratic age grade tradition), the Piegans (with an individualistic age grade tradition), and the Southern Cheyennes (without an age grade tradition). The research seeks 1) to demonstrate relationships between cultural tradition and aging and between specific kinds of contact conditions and aging in the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Piegan societies; 2) to compare the history of aging and age group relations in the three societies in order to determine a) what part cultural traditions of aging have played and what part Indian-White contact conditions have played in the variation in Plains Indian patterns of aging over the last 130 years; and b) how the status and roles of today's Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Piegan elders, and the ability of these elders to cope with problems of aging, differ, and in what ways these differences are a result of contrasting cultural adaptations, variant contact conditions, and differences in contemporary social service policies and programs.